openrecord.org -- the OpenRecord project ended in 2008, and this old website is here just for the historical record

About the OpenRecord project

The goal of the project is to create an open source software product. The product we're making is a wiki engine, but where most wiki engines are geared toward pages of text, OpenRecord is geared toward loosely-structured database content.

Status (as of November 2008)

OpenRecord is continuing as an ongoing Dojo Foundation project. In November 2008 we started working on a new version of OpenRecord. In our Subversion repository, this new OpenRecord Redux code lives side-by-side with our original OpenRecord Classic code. OpenRecord Redux uses the current Dojo 1.2 release, including the latest version of the Grid widget.

OpenRecord Redux has a user interface that's similar to the original OpenRecord Classic, but the internals have some significant differences. The original OpenRecord Classic was an almost completely client-side application -- lots of JavaScript, with only a tiny amount of PHP. This new OpenRecord Redux has a more traditional AJAX architecture, with both client-side and server-side code. This means that each OpenRecord page can have a unique URL, and it makes it possible for pages to be displayed correctly (and quickly) even if JavaScript isn't running in the browser, all of which means that this new OpenRecord architecture should play more nicely with search engine indexing robots, like the Googlebot, and may be a better foundation for working with mobile devices like cell phones. In the new OpenRecord Redux code, the client-side is still JavaScript code using Dojo tools and widgets, and the server-side code is written in Python using Django templates, with data storage provided by the Google App Engine, at least for the time being.

History

OpenRecord Classic
- February 2005 -- started writing code
- August 2005 -- first demo documents, and first real demos
- November 2005 -- became a project of the Dojo Foundation
- February 2006 -- first screencasts
- Summer 2006 -- participated in Google's Summer of Code
- Summer 2006 -- new plugins: bar-chart, scatter-plot, pivot-table
- September 2006 -- new demo page on the web site (with compressed pre-built code)
- mid-2006 to mid-2007 -- collaborated on designing new Dojo data-access APIs (dojo.data)
- Spring 2007 -- converted OpenRecord to use the new dojo.data APIs
- Summer 2007 -- converted OpenRecord from dojo 0.4 to dojo 0.9
- Summer 2007 -- began collaborating with Atomic Labs
- Fall 2007 -- first version to use Google Gears
- Late 2007 -- converted OpenRecord from dojo 0.9 to dojo 1.0
OpenRecord Redux
- Late 2008 -- started writing code for "OpenRecord Redux"

License

OpenRecord is open source software. OpenRecord is distributed by the Dojo Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to creating open source AJAX software. The OpenRecord code is available under either the Academic Free License or the BSD License, whichever you prefer.

Some similar apps

Here's a list of projects that have some similar features.